Archive for April 2015

Acts 2: 23 Though He was delivered up according to God’s determined plan and foreknowledge, you used lawless people to nail Him to a cross and kill Him. 24 God raised Him up, ending the pains of death, because it was not possible for Him to be held by it. 25 For David says of Him:I saw the Lord ever before me;
because He is at my right hand,
I will not be shaken.
26 Therefore my heart was glad,
and my tongue rejoiced.
Moreover, my flesh will rest in hope,
27 because You will not leave me in Hades
or allow Your Holy One to see decay.

Isaiah 53: He was taken away because of oppression
and who considered His fate?
For He was cut off from the land of the living;
He was struck because of my people’s rebellion.
9 They made His grave with the wicked…
although He had done no violence
and had not spoken deceitfully.
10 … He will see His seed….

My righteous Servant will justify many,
and He will carry their iniquities.
12 Therefore I will give Him the many as a portion,
and He will receive the mighty as spoil,
because He submitted Himself to death,
and was counted among the rebels;
yet He bore the sin of many

Christ was not justified by grace. Christ was justified by justice without grace. Christ’s elect are justified by justice and grace, because Christ’s elect are born ungodly and need Christ’s death legally imputed to them by God’s grace before Christ’s elect can be justified by justice.

There are two kinds of justification, but only one kind of righteousness that God will accept. God justifies Christ not because of His resurrection, but because of Christ’s full satisfaction of divine law. Christ’s resurrection is God’s justification based on Christ’s obedience even unto death. We call the death that satisfied the law Christ’s righteousness.

Christ’s righteousness is the only kind God accepts. So the second kind of justification is the kind in which God imputes Christ’s righteousness to the elect.

I Timothy 3:16 is a very interesting verse to think about. Christ was justified. Now, how was Christ justified? Certainly NOT by the work of the work of the Holy Spirit. Christ was NOT justified after becoming born again. Christ was justified by satisfying the righteous requirement of the law for the sins imputed to Christ. Christ was justified by His death. Christ needed to be justified because Christ legally shared the guilt of His elect, and this guilt demanded His death. Christ was not justified because of His resurrection. Christ’s resurrection was Christ’s justification, and that judicial declaration was because of Christ’s death.

Romans 6:9–”We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. 10 For the death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God.”

So Christ was justified by His own righteousness. Christ was declared to be just, not simply by who He was as an incarnate person, but by His death in satisfaction of the law. No righteousness was imputed or shared from somebody else to Christ, because Christ had earned His own righteousness by His own death.

God’s declaration (in the resurrection) that Christ (God the Son) is righteous is on the basis of what Christ did in His death..

Romans 4:24-25 –Righteousness will be counted to us who believe in him who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord, who was delivered up because of our trespasses and raised because of our justification.

The justification of the elect sinner is different from the justification of Christ. The legal merit of Christ’s death is shared by God with the elect sinner, as Romans 6 says, when they are placed/baptized into that death. This is NOT the Holy Spirit baptizing us into Christ. Nor is it Christ baptizing with the Holy Spirit.

So only one righteousness. In Christ’s case, no legal sharing. In the case of the justified elect, that same one death is legally shared, and this one death is enough, because counted to them it completely satisfies the law for righteousness. (Romans 10:4)

Romans 6:7–”For one who has died has been justified from sin. 8 Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. 9 We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him.”

Fesko is correct in thinking of resurrection not as the basis but as God’s declaration of justification. The Norman Shepherd (“federal vision”) problem creeps in when people begin to think that since Christ was justified by what He did, then the elect also must be justified by what they are enabled to do.

But there is only kind of justification for sinners like us, and it’s by imputation. It’s not in the future. And we will never be justified the same way Christ was.

We are ONLY justified by what Christ did, and NOT by what Christ is now doing in us. Christ alone was justified by what He did. Only Christ could be (and was) justified by producing righteousness.

Lee Irons p 17—The covenant becomes a way, therefore, of circumventing strict justice, making possible the arbitrary acceptance as meritorious of that which is not actually meritorious….. Casting about for some way of bridging the awesome metaphysical gap between God and the creature, the voluntarist seizes on the notion of a condescension expressed by way of covenant… The voluntarist definition of merit must be qualified as a lesser merit that cannot even exist apart from God’s gracious acceptation.

Lee Irons—But Kline searches for an entirely new definition of merit: “God’s justice must be defined and judged in terms of what he stipulates in his covenants”….Covenant is not a voluntary condescension of divine grace but a revelation of divine justice. …God’s freedom must be maintained, but not at the expense of the divine perfections (i.e., wisdom, goodness, justice, holiness, truth, and rationality). God does not act arbitrarily, for all his actions are expressive of and delimited by his attributes.

Bruce Baughus—-Calvin, however, develops a different line–one that makes no appeal to the infinite worth of the divine person but looks instead to the decretive will of God. We find this in his discussion of how we can correctly say that Christ has merited grace and salvation for us. Here he argues that, When we treat of the merit of Christ, we do not place the beginning in him, but we ascend to the ordination of God as the primary cause, because of his mere good pleasure he appointed a Mediator to purchase salvation for us (Institutes, 2.17.1). Instead of an appeal to the divine person of the Word incarnate who was that mediator, Calvin appeals to the arrangement decreed by God out “of his mere good pleasure. Calvin goes so far as to argue that “Christ could not merit anything save by the good pleasure of God,” meaning that “the merit of Christ depends entirely on the grace of God (which provided this mode of salvation for us)” (2.17.1).
Baughus— Although both Scotus and Calvin agree that the will of God is the source of Christ’s merit, Calvin argues that Christ’s work has infinite merit on the basis of God’s decree. The difference may seem subtle but is significant: Scotus’s argument from the divine will to accept Christ’s work as counterfactually sufficient is later developed by Hugo Grotius into his moral governmental theory of the atonement. Calvin’s view precludes such development

Mark Jones–Anselm argued that Christ, as a rational being, owed obedience to God. But to make satisfaction on behalf of sinners, Christ had to go beyond a life of obedience – he had to die. As the God-man, Christ’s death was therefore supererogatory – a death above God’s requirement of him. His death is superabundant to make satisfaction for sins. Gataker and Vines, for example, used Anselm’s argument to reject the imputation of the active obedience of Christ. Christ’s death was supererogatory and therefore only his death merited eternal life. http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2015/04/can-humans-merit-before-god-2.php

A line from a Taiwanese pop TV show several years ago, “if apology works, then what’s the point of police?” If your apology can move God to forgive you, then what’s the point of Christ’s death?

The prevailing idea is salvation is by “do what you can” – the requirement varies based on their assessment of human ability, the more optimistic ones require a close to perfect reform, and the more pessimistic ones require “faith alone” – we can’t do the law, but at least we can “believe”, and God being gracious will accept that…one such person says, “God looks for reasons (in us) to save us”.

But righteousness is never about what the unrighteous can do, just as life is never about what the dead can do.
God demands men to be righteous. Born in Adam, we are already unrighteous. Since we desire to have our unrighteousness covered, in our evil imagination (unless and until we are effectually called by God’s gospel) always buy into the lie that yes, we can cover our unrighteousness. Given that we are ALREADY guilty, this reaction of “yes, we can” is FURTHER defiance of God’s law, and COMPOUNDS our guilt.

It is not anything in us or proceeding from us that placed us under God’s wrath. We are ALREADY condemned by imputed guilt, before we are FURTHER condemned by our works of flesh, among which is our self-righteousness, i.e. our imagination that yes, we can cover our unrighteousness.

Our fundamental problem is not our self-righteousness, but our unrighteousness. We are not saved by our not being self-righteous. We are saved by Christ’s death for God’s elect, and one result of Christ’s death is that God causes those for whom Christ died to repent from their self-righteousness and believe in Christ’s righteousness(and not our repentance or belief)as the whole reason of our salvation.

It is self-righteousness to condition our justification on our not being self-righteous. It is unrepentant unbelief to condition the application of Christ’s death on our repentance and belief. The elect repent and believe as a result of Christ’s death for them.